Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Can I Become A Good Hacker Without A Prior Knowledge Of Programming??

"Can I become a good hacker without knowning Programming?", "Is Programming necessary for learning how to hack", I usually get these question asked almost daily, There have been lots of debates on this topic, Some think that it's necessary while others think that it's not necessary at all, So I thought to write a post on this topic explaining my views if programming is necessary for becoming a hacker or not.The answer is that it depends:

Why it's not necessary?

In early 90's the best hackers were known as those who were best at the knowledge of programming and the reason for that was probably that almost every thing was based on a command line so it was for sure that if some one is a good hacker he is surely a good programmer.

However the definition of hackers sort of changed after the beginning of 21'ST century, One could become a fairly good hacker without any knowledge of programming, This reason for that is because now a days there are lots of ready made tools which helps you to compromise a machine without any knowledge of Programming, Take an example of "Havij", Havij is a small software which helps you automate the process of SQL Injection and helps you extract sensitive database information in seconds where it may take hours in some cases to extract it, If you still don't agree with me try answering the following question:

Does it matter if an elite hacker writes a buffer overflow or a script kiddy runs a tool if the target system gets compromised anyway?

Where It's Necessary?

It's true that many good hackers are technology buffs and are curious about how things work, this is where you need to have prior knowledge of Programming in order to know how things work.

Another reason is why you should probably learn Programming is that you can write your own exploit (An exploit is a peice of code which can be used to gain access to the target machine using a specific vulnerability), which is the single most important thing which will separate you from rest of the script kiddies out there and most of the times some of the exploit codes comes with several code mistakes which are kept by Elite hackers themselves to prevent script kiddies or people with very little knowledge of hacking to run it.

In Short:

You can become a fairly good hacker without having a prior knowledge of programming but if you want take your hacking skills to the next level I will recommend you to learn Programming now the question which might arise in your mind is that what Programming languages should I learn?, I will cover it in my upcoming posts.

Feel free to express your views on the topic, Whether you agree with me or not?